Analytics don’t lie. Despite the overwhelming coverage of seemingly more cool technologies like SSD and Cloud Storage, tape related articles consistently rank in the top 10 most read pieces on Storage Switzerland. Right now our blog on the presence of tape at EMC World is seeing twice as much traffic as all the other EMC World related content. Why? Many of our readers are coming to the obvious conclusion that tape, despite the negative marketing, is still an optimal way to protect and archive their information.

Why Tape?

As we will discuss in the upcoming webinar “The Four Reasons the Data Center Is Returning to Tape”, the reasons people are coming back to tape is as interesting as the fact that they are coming back. All the drivers that started the replace-tape-with-disk movement in the first place - reliability, performance, portability and off-site data movement - are now liabilities in a disk only strategy. The latest statistics indicate that tape is significantly more reliable than disk and once streaming, it’s also significantly faster, plus LTFS has solved the portability issue.

Disk on the other hand is struggling in its effort to maintain those former advantages. As disk drives become larger they also become less reliable. And the performance of those systems, as data sets get larger, is a concern, as is portability between platforms due to proprietary backup applications.

Even off-site data movement, which thanks to deduplication technologies seemed to have given disk an insurmountable advantage, may be better served by tape. As the old saying goes “Nothing beats the bandwidth of a FedEx plane full of tapes”. With deduplication the off-site replication of nightly incremental disk backups is doable, but replication of the first full, or a large net new data set, is a significant challenge for disk based systems.

Why now?

A common thread running through descriptions of tape’s advantages is the need to handle a large amount of data, and to retain that data for a long period of time. We call this “Big Data Archive”, something that my colleague Eric Slack discussed in detail in his White Paper “Storage Infrastructures For Big Data Workflows”. By the way, this is the second most requested white paper on our site. For data centers of all sizes data is getting bigger and tape is ideally suited to handle it.

The second “why now” reason is that IT budgets are still tight and showing no signs of loosening, so economics continue to play a key role in product selection. Even with all the deduplication technology available, disk is still more expensive than tape, on a capacity basis. As we discussed in the article “Comparing LTO-6 to Scale-Out Storage for Long-Term Retention” an LTO-6 cartridge will store 8TB of information for less than $150. That’s a significant price advantage compared to any disk based system.

Finally, the ability to blend strategies is easier than ever. An increasing number of software applications are adding support for tape as are cloud storage providers. A great example was again at EMC World where we saw EMC announce support for tape as a back end to their formally disk-only Avamar solution. We know of several other disk-only solutions that are preparing tape support in upcoming product releases.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that the data center of the future will be primarily solid state disk on the front end of the storage infrastructure and tape based on the back end. I’ll cover how this will come to fruition in an upcoming blog and it is the topic of my seminar submission to SNW.